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I am excited to announce today that @eLife is transitioning to a new model based on author-driven publishing (preprints) and public post-publication peer review and curation https://elifesciences.org/articles/64910?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=pr2020
Our moves are designed to catalyze the desperately needed transition of science from the slow, exclusive, and expensive "review then publish" model born with the printing press to a "publish then review" model optimized for the Internet.
We have been inspired by the embrace of preprinting by our community. A recent internet audit showed that the authors of 70% of papers under review @eLife had already published their work on @biorxivpreprint @medrxivpreprint or arXiv.
This means that in reality @eLife is no longer a publisher who makes works available to the public, rather, we are an organization that reviews and curates papers that have already been published. And with the changes announced today we are embracing & going all in on this model.
First, after a brief transition period, @eLife will be exclusively reviewing articles already published by the authors as preprints. Second, we are refocusing our editorial process around the production of public reviews, to be posted alongside the authors' manuscript.
Our primary function with thus be to transform preprints into refereed preprints that couple an authors' manuscript with high-quality, constructive peer reviews written and constructed for readers of papers and users of the data and results they contain.
Ultimately he hope to do away entirely with journals by augment these reviews with assessments from our editors and reviewers of the audience, level of interest and potential impact of the work - the kind of thing we currently try (very imperfectly) to capture in journal titles.
But we are mindful that, today, the authors who entrust us with their work have to navigate a career and funding landscape that expects them to publish their work in traditional journals that dispense formal markers of publication.
Therefore, while we develop better alternatives, we will still be making decisions about which papers will be published by @eLife, and we will still publish these papers on our website, as we always have.
We will also allow authors whose papers we decide not to publish in @eLife to postpone the posting of our public reviews until after their work is accepted at another journal.
The idea is to not have the assessment of our reviewers and editors prejudice the ability of authors to publish their paper somewhere else, while incentivizing authors to deal with substantive critiques that will ultimately be made public.
We are very excited for this new future, especially for all the ways this new system can open up the process of peer review and assessment.
The real opportunities – and challenges – will come from the more radical and dramatic changes to science publishing that will be possible once we finally break free of the "one paper, one journal, one publication model" that still dominates the field.
There is no reason for example, for papers to be reviewed only once, or by only one entity. The review process should involve multiple voices and go on for as long as the work is relevant.
It should be possible, for examples, for reviews to be written by anyone with something useful to say about a work – not just the people who have been selected by a journal or other entity.
This democratization of review can bring many benefits. But it is not without risks. We do not want the evaluation of science to become any more of a popularity contest than it already is, and we want to make sure that the process is as fair and free of bias as humanly possible.
We are excited to work with all of you to make this system work for all os us. And we reiterate our commitment to observe how it is impacting everyone involved in science and medicine, and to always be willing to fight for changes that make research communication better for all.
